Building Learning Communities 2013

Twitter is an exceptionally powerful--and seriously underused--capture tool. The platform is ideal for snaring dialogue--whether in a film or presentation, a meeting or class discussion. Conversations normally lost are easily recorded and archived for future use. Even notes on a whiteboard or personal notepad can be photographed and posted on Twitter.My senior students and I have been using Twitter to host our classroom, capturing our conversations in and out of class with people around the world, since October 2012. To date, we’ve amassing more than 11,000 tweets, all of them automatically archived in a Google spreadsheet and later mined, manipulated and visualized using google scripts. Participants will leave this session knowing:how to use hashtags to define the class "space" and themes, best practices for collaborative note-taking, how to automatically archive tweets and set up a Twitter visualization using Google scripting, how to use web tools to organize and archive collections of tweets around discussions and some legal considerations.